Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 7

The LONG Trust

When I first started gardening years ago, I read somewhere that seeds kept in a closed container in the refrigerator would last a long time. Ever the frugal gardener, and much to the chagrin of the seed companies, I would faithfully buy a seed packet, use only as many seeds as I thought I needed, and store the rest in the refrigerator container for another year. This container went from refrigerator to refrigerator, house to house as we moved, never with any thinning out of packets. This spring, when I went through my collection of seeds, I decided to sow some Tiny Tims, a small tomato plant with lots of cherry-sized fruit. I hadn't grown them in many years, and the date on the seed packet was 1986. I only wanted a plant or two, and assuming the germination rate would be poor at best, I planted nine seeds. Eight of them came up. Similarly, I have way too many thyme and majoram plants, again from seeds I bought in the 1980s. These were all seeds that had traveled through three states and four houses and their corresponding refrigerators, seeds a year younger than my middle child and two years older than my youngest child. I didn't have much hope that they would germinate, but the seeds themselves didn't seem to have any problem with sitting in a plastic box for 39 years waiting for their moment in the sun...literally.

If this story sounds vaguely familiar, I wrote a similar post* when I first started this blog back in 2013 when those seeds were only 27 years old. The theme of that post was about how old seeds can provide fresh harvests no matter how long the seeds have been sitting dormant. In the case of spiritual seeds, it's only a matter of God's timing, His decision that the seed He has planted, perhaps decades ago, can now germinate, grow and finally become fruitful. This present post is less about God's timing – that's a given – and more about our attitude of trust regarding His timing. How deep is our trust when we have to wait a long, long, longgggg time to see the fulfillment of what we hope for? Maybe I can trust God for something that needs to be resolved in the next week, the next month (like selling a house with a twelve foot hole in the front lawn). But can I trust God with the LONG trust, the one that I may never live to see the fulfillment of? Many of us are no strangers to praying for a loved one or a situation or a relationship that has seemingly been going on unchanged for years, and we see no progress anywhere in the near future. Do we still trust that God is there, that He sees what we see and that He is working even if we don't see any present indications of His working? Do we have the faith and stamina for the LONG trust?

Our son, the middle child, reached second grade with the reading skills of a preschooler. Testing by the district psychologist showed him to be gifted in math but learning disabled in all of the skill areas necessary for reading. School had been, and continued to be, very difficult for him. I was a reading specialist by training and he had been read to since before he could talk. His sisters would be avid readers, as was his dad, and he was always surrounded by books. He prayed, we prayed that he would be able to read better. Reading and writing was a slow painful process for him and he avoided them as much as he was able. One day, in 8^th grade, he came home with a book that his teacher had lent him, a historical novel he said he thought looked interesting. It was the first time I saw him pick up a book that wasn't a mandatory school assignment. I had been praying for God to do something is this area with him and this is the first glimpse I had of God working. I think, again, I may have been in my resigned/submitted/compliant/acquiescent mode, but there was a certain amount of weak trust that God was forming the man He wanted our son to be even if he never become an avid reader. High school found my son in basic English classes which he surprisingly liked and did well in. He still balked at writing assignments, often making creative movies as alternate projects for all subject areas, surprising his math teachers with math movies that fulfilled assignment requirements.

We sent our son off to college with some fear and trepidation. As a student athlete, he had ample access to academic help, but he seemed to do OK on his own. He finished reading assignments and started to read and acquire books he didn't actually need. He frequently visited thrift stores and library discard rooms, even went dumpster diving in an alley where students threw away books they no longer wanted. Fast forward to the present day: there are at least a dozen boxes of books in our basement we are storing for him. He's just come in from his third trip to the library this week where he reads newspapers and checks out books, reading sections of them aloud to us because he finds so many things so interesting that he just can't help himself.

I relate this story because it's the closest I've come to being able to understand the LONG trust, of praying and asking God for something that was so long and slow and often painful in coming, something that was easy to doubt would ever happen. And, yet, God proved faithful. Old dormant seeds and non-reading second graders can both be transformed to bear fruit in God's time. There may be other things we will not see come to fruition in our life time, but it doesn't mean that God is not working. Isaiah says His understanding is unsearchable.** I take this to mean that we may never know or fully understand God's way of making things happen nor His timing. But we are not called to understand God's way and time. We are only called to the trust Him with the LONG trust.

Easter is the perfect time to explore the LONG trust. The time from Christ's death on Good Friday to his resurrection on Easter Sunday was only three days, though for his disciples it probably felt interminable. Easter, though, is the culmination of the greatest LONG trust, the salvation story, God's plan for a Savior, promised to Adam and Eve, worked out through the ages through Abraham and his descendants, through Moses and the Hebrew people, through kings such as David and Solomon, and faithful prophets. Despite Egyptian slavery and Babylonian captivity, despite fleshly human failures by all the major players and some truly rotten kings, God comes through with His perfect Son in His perfect timing. Jesus' death and resurrection is the fulfillment of that great LONG trust. So worth the wait...

*https://marynapier.blogspot.com/2013/05/p-margin-bottom-0_3.html

**Isaiah 40:28b